Interestingly, none of the college professors I had had any education whatsoever in teaching. Neither did my dad, who was a professor for 20 years. They just knew the material.

Feynman, perhaps the greatest physics teacher ever, had 0 teaching credentials. I attended one of his lectures long ago, a privilege I didn't realize until much later.

This works pretty well in an environment of highly motivated university students. But there are reasons why we expect teachers to be educated on how to teach in general.

I highly respect you, and we seem to talk here a lot. But you have this habit of holding up various edge cases that don't quite directly relate to what we're talking about as "gotchas".

I have 0 teaching credentials, too, and think I'm pretty great. The current systems we have for younger students require teaching credentials, and there's some good reasons to require some education-in-education before letting someone teach kids.

There’s no evidence teaching degrees make people better teachers.

::: It's easier to pick a good teacher than to train one: Familiar and new results on the correlates of teacher effectiveness

Neither holding a college major in education nor acquiring a master's degree is correlated with elementary and middle school teaching effectiveness, regardless of the university at which the degree was earned. Teachers generally do become more effective with a few years of teaching experience, but we also find evidence that teachers may become less effective with experience, particularly later in their careers. These and other findings with respect to the correlates of teacher effectiveness are obtained from estimations using value-added models that control for student characteristics as well as school and (where appropriate teacher) fixed effects in order to measure teacher effectiveness in reading and math for Florida students in fourth through eighth grades for eight school years, 2001–2002 through 2008–2009.

Research highlights ▶ Majoring in education is not associated with teacher effectiveness. ▶ University attended for college is not associated with teacher effectiveness. ▶ Acquiring a master's degree is not associated with teacher effectiveness. ▶ Teachers become more effective with a few years of teaching experience. ▶ Teachers may become less effective later in their careers.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S02727...

I've already read this research. The problem is that there's massive selection biases at work.

It doesn't mean taking more people without teaching credentials results in an equal or greater quality of education.

e.g. I am a high school dropout who's doing pretty-damn-well at teaching. I do not think this means we need more high school dropouts teaching, though.

I've learned a whole lot reading the pedagogy literature and reading about the kinds of strategies that credentialed teachers are required to learn during their practicum and student teaching. It's difficult to imagine that these courses of study are not useful.

(The research does probably mean that programs intended to incentivize existing teachers to get graduate degrees are probably flawed, except for some special cases in e.g. secondary math education)

In my voyage through the public school system, I never noticed any particular methodology used to teach.

I agree that specialized techniques help with specific learning disabilities, I've seen it in action. But for ordinary kids (the vast majority), the teacher just walks through the textbook for the class. The smarter kids just read the textbook and learn it themselves, as the teacher is moving too ssllooooooowwllyy.

Frankly, the teachers didn't know what to do with me. Some wanted to be rid of me. Some liked me. I don't recall learning much from any of them.

My history teacher would show Mr Magoo movies. I'm not kidding. My auto shop teacher would show drag racing newsreels. I did like my wood shop teacher. He taught me how to use machine tools and not cut my fingers off (he'd lost his in a table saw). That's paid off dividends for me my whole life since. But I don't think that required special teaching training. I learned how to use metal working machine tools in college from the head machinist, who simply enjoyed showing me how to run them.

> But for ordinary kids (the vast majority), the teacher just walks through the textbook for the class

IMO: This is a terrible way to teach. Even for very highly curriculum-driven classes like the microeconomics class I'm teaching.

My block periods are 1 hour 16 minutes. This is a long, long time to be giving dry lecture or popcorn-reading a textbook.

Bell-ringer activities and exit tickets. Gimkit to break up long lectures and get an instant reading of mastery. Appropriate strategies towards looping and unit construction. Pacing, formative vs. summative assessments.

Just how to effectively create discussions is tricky. Everyone looked a bit zoned out when we're talking about consumer surplus. "EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU HAS EXPERIENCED CONSUMER SURPLUS." Huh? "EVERY SINGLE ONE OF YOU HAS EXPERIENCED CONSUMER SURPLUS. Tell me when!" a few seconds of silence... eventually "Uhm.. there was a thing of candy and it had 4 pieces, and said 25 cents on it. I thought it was 25 cents apiece and I brought a dollar to the counter, but I got 75 cents back..." "Boom! That's 75 cents of consumer surplus!" Cue everyone sharing their concept of it and internalizing it when I had been losing the whole class.

I didn't have training. But I did have a year where I didn't have many classes to teach and I had a very masterful teacher on the other side of the wall and I could listen to him and learn some of what he did. And I've read a whole lot about pedagogy and research from the National Training Laboratories about what are best practices.

> My history teacher would show Mr Magoo movies.

lol. I'm about to show a 2 minute clip from a cartoon where a shopkeeper says that it's Christmas Eve and that they're going to "jack the prices to the moon" because the customer has no other choice to illustrate elasticity of supply and demand.

> He taught me how to use machine tools and not cut my fingers off

I teach robotics, and that means teaching the use of machine tools to middle school and high school students that have no common sense. It is stressful. I agree no one trains you for that :D

On the other hand, teaching is an innate human capability, and a big part of what makes us humans. An education degree is an extremely recent phenomenon.

Clearly, some teachers are better at it than others. But if anyone did a study and found that Masters in Ed teachers did a better job than Bachelors in Ed teachers, I'd be genuinely surprised.

> On the other hand, teaching is an innate human capability, and a big part of what makes us humans.

That depends on what you mean by teaching. Explicit formal instruction with at least some attention to abstract principles is basically unknown in non-literate societies. People are generally terrible at it without experience. Observational learning is something people are amazingly good at, and language helps a lot but teaching isn’t even a universal in human societies. Watching and learning with occasional, minimal correction is.

Anyone who wants to learn more should read The Anthropology of Childhood by David F. Lance.

Homeschoolers seem to do rather well with no such training.

Many parents teach their preschoolers the basics of reading before they enter school. Those parents have no special skills. My parents taught me arithmetic as a preschooler. My 8th grade teachers were still trying to teach the kids the multiplication tables.

(Personally, I suspected those kids knew the tables, they had just figured out that they could keep the teachers stuck in a loop by pretending to fail all the tests. This way they would not have to learn any more advanced material like fractions AAAAAIIIIIEEEEEEEE!!!!! This looping business was made abundantly clear to me later, when other students bragged to me how they snookered the teacher into failing to advance.)

> On the other hand, teaching is an innate human capability, and a big part of what makes us humans.

I've spent my whole career "teaching" in that sense. Explaining things, mentoring junior engineers, etc.

There's definitely skill transfer from that, but it's a bit different of a thing to try and take 25 12-year olds of vastly different backgrounds and ability for a year and get most of them to master a given curriculum.

Yes, it's different, and it's a LOT slower, as the teacher goes over it again and again and again and again and zzzzzzzz......

I missed the first 3 months of 4th grade. The teacher told my mom that they had advanced very quickly, and I could never catch up. I would have to be put back in 3rd grade. My mom said nope, Walter is going in 4th grade.

It was as if I wasn't gone a day. 4th grade had not advanced one iota. Not much to show for 30 hours of instruction per week for three months.

College was a bit different. They blew through 2 years of high school physics in a couple of lectures. This was a tremendous shock to me, and frankly terrifying. I learned I could not afford to miss one lecture, or even be late, let alone 3 months of them.

> Yes, it's different, and it's a LOT slower, as the teacher goes over it again and again and again and again and zzzzzzzz......

Three things:

* The normal pace anywhere -- even most colleges that are not CalTech or MIT -- is for chumps. It's slow so that everyone can keep up.

* On the other hand, I don't think your experience is representative of current middle class (and above) schools. Students complete a whole lot of what was previously considered college curriculum before graduating. Many of the students at my school graduate with >1 year of college credit, and this is despite the non-remedial curriculum floor in colleges moving up from decades ago.

* I don't think you can generalize your experience. You are very intelligent. Your experience (and mine) are not representative of overall student performance or problems.